


Forward Through the Night

by captain_iodine (orphan_account)



Series: Songbird [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, F/M, Falling Out of Love, Prequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-20 17:27:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9502388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/captain_iodine
Summary: The Brotherhood got more than they bargained for when they recruited Nora Williams; in time, so did Paladin Danse.Most love stories are about fallinginlove; this one is about falling out of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to the José González song ['Far Away'](https://g.co/kgs/iNWxEw).
> 
> Where Songbird is a story about Danse and Curie slowly learning to trust — and, eventually, feel for — one another, this fic is about the reverse for Danse and Nora.
> 
> I think there's a certain poignancy to watching couples fall out of love, particularly when there's a sense that if it weren't for a steadily escalating set of circumstances, things might have turned out all right for them.
> 
> This work is a prequel to [Songbird](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8442982/chapters/19341991). While I don't intend for either work to spoil the other (for the moment), I feel like thematically Forward Through the Night should be read from [Chapter 6](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8442982/chapters/21475676) onwards. Hell, you can probably read it without touching Songbird at all, if angst is more your dish.

The wastelander looks up at him with her jaw stuck out defiantly. Underneath her knit cap and the layers of dirt, he can see wisps of blonde hair where they cling to her neck in the mist of rain all around them.

She doesn’t look like much, but then she just handled a mob of ferals almost entirely on her own steam. He’s seen Knights go down over less.

‘You handled yourself well, civilian,’ he says.

She laughs, and he withers a little under her shrewd, unflinching stare. He might have been sizing her up while she fought, studying her technique and her tenacity, but he feels equally under scrutiny from her.

‘I’ve got training,’ she says. ‘Served with the 108th.’

‘The 108th?’ he replies, confused. He hasn’t heard the name before — perhaps some obscure militia. He hopes at the very least that it doesn’t have something to do with the Enclave.

She nods. To him she seems flippant: bored. She glances about the lot where they stand in front of the police station, taking it all in. Her eyes flit to Rhys and Haylen where they sit by the entrance, the Scribe patching up the Knight’s wounds.

‘Probably before your time,’ she says.

He doesn’t know whether she’s being ironic or not; even under all the dirt, she looks a full decade younger than him.

‘Military or mercenaries?’ she asks, gesturing to his power armor.

‘I’m the one asking the questions.’

He knows right away that it was the wrong thing to say, and even though he isn’t in the habit of caring about offending civilians, something about the look of disdain on her face makes him wish he could backpedal and stuff the words right back into his mouth.

‘And _I’m_ the one who just saved your ass,’ she retorts. She doesn’t seem angry — the roll of her eyes and the little head toss she gives hint more at boredom. ‘A little gratitude might be nice.’

The blood thrums in his veins; he stares at her for some hint of irony, but she gives him none.

Then he realizes that she has a point: if she hadn’t responded to their distress call, he can’t rightly say they’d still be standing right now.

The irritation simmers down somewhat, as much an exercise in patience as anything else. He takes a deep breath, counts out a couple of beats, then approaches from another angle.

‘Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot,’ he says. ‘I’m Paladin Danse. That’s Scribe Haylen, and Knight Rhys. We’re with the Brotherhood of Steel.’

Her eyes narrow a little and he sees her flick another glance in the direction of his squad mates. While her gaze is elsewhere, he allows himself a moment to take her in fully: the weathered leather breastplate and shoulder pads, the ill-fitting jacket and pants. He thinks he spies a flash of blue amid the washed-out brown and khaki and it dawns on him that she’s wearing a vault suit underneath all those clothes.

‘Vault dweller?’ he asks, with a nod toward the little scrap of blue.

She seems to tense when she hears his question, and before he can get an answer she steps away and drops to her haunches beside the dog she brought along with her, digging her fingers deeply into its fur to scratch its neck. It gives an appreciative whine.

‘Something like that,’ she says, too softly, and he wonders if he was even meant to hear her words at all.

She stands eventually, dusting off her hands as she turns to face him. 

‘You make it a habit to get overrun by those things?’

He doesn’t need any explanation as to what _things_ she refers to. Barely paces away, three of the abominations are piled in a heap with arms outstretched: gunned down before they ever got close enough to lay a hand on her.

‘Ferals have a habit of swarming,’ he says. ‘Before you know it, a handful turns into twenty or more.’

‘Ferals?’

He blinks. Was she in a vault so long that she truly never encountered a feral ghoul? It seems unlikely; maybe she’s being ironic again.

‘Civilian,’ he says, and he sees her flinch slightly, ‘if you’re looking for work, we could always use an extra gun. You’re better trained than most of the initiates we take in, whatever your background.’

‘I’m not sure I’m looking to enlist again,’ she says slowly.

He shakes his head.

‘I’m not looking for your allegiance,’ he replies. ‘Just your assistance, until we can regroup with the rest of the Brotherhood. Scribe Haylen has been working to boost the radio signal here at the station, but she needs extra parts.’

She meets his eye and it seems to him that she’s weighing things up. At least she hasn’t dismissed the idea entirely yet.

‘And what would that entail?’

He lays it out for her — ArcJet; the deep range transmitter. He wonders how much of her willingness to at least hear him out is fueled by the desire for remuneration, but by the end of it she hasn’t brought up the question of caps.

She paces awhile, carefully stepping around the withered bodies of the ghouls littering the concrete. When she comes back to him, arms wrapped around her chest, she seems resolute.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll help you out. But just until you get what you need — then I’m gone.’

He nods; he knows he’s asking so much of her already.

‘I appreciate it.’

She moves to go past him into the station, but he calls to her as she goes.

‘Ma’am?’ he says. When she turns, he thinks she looks tired. ‘I never got your name.’

A long moment stretches out, during which he’s not sure if she’ll even respond. He’d be surprised — worried, even — if this weren’t such a common practice. There are a number of reasons a person might not be so quick to give out their name to a stranger; he’s not about to make any assumptions about hers.

‘Nora,’ she says, eventually.

Her mouth fits strangely around the name — as though she’s unaccustomed to saying it. He wonders whose name it was, before she borrowed it for herself.

‘Nora Williams.’


	2. Chapter 2

She listens to Danse’s heartbeat beneath her head, steady and reassuring. For all that Maxson might have said about him being a machine, she knows he’s real — knows he’s human. He still bleeds red, just like everybody else; his body had still awoken to her touch, when despair drove them into each other’s arms.

What if Maxson had sent somebody else? What if she hadn’t gotten to him on time?

She squeezes her eyes shut and fights off the thoughts. They’re irrelevant now: what ever _might have_ happened, she’s here now.

She can’t help but wonder if Maxson already knows that she spared Danse — if the Brotherhood are searching for them both even now. She couldn’t help but check over shoulder as she had come here, taking a circuitous route to shake off anybody who might have been following her.

It feels like it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to her.

She slips out from under Danse’s arm, missing the warmth immediately as the chill of the bunker sets her skin into goosebumps. She finds her discarded clothes and dresses quickly. With one last look over at Danse where he still lies sleeping, his expression finally — mercifully — one of peace, she heads for the elevator to the surface.

Her hands tremble as she digs around in the pockets of her flight suit, finding the flip lighter first and then — after a moment of panic that it’s gone — the rolled cigarette. The latter is crushed almost to nothing from being in her pocket for so long, but it holds together well enough for her to light.

She hasn’t smoked since before she was pregnant; she’s been saving this for just such an occasion.

The first drag is dizzying: she’s not sure if it’s the nicotine hit after so long, or the familiar smell from a lifetime gone by.

She leans back against the wall behind her, savoring the taste.

‘You smoke?’

Danse leans in the doorway, his eyebrow raised a little in distaste. She feels the instinct, old but not forgotten, to drop the cigarette and crush it under the toe of her boot, but she manages to keep it rooted in her hand. When she takes another drag, she’s careful not to blow it in Danse’s face.

‘Used to,’ she says, with a shrug. She flicks the ash from the end of it with an oft-practiced flick.

Danse looks hesitant. She wonders at first if it bothers him so much, but then it occurs to her that he probably needs the release.

‘Here,’ she says.

She hands it to him and he holds it awkwardly, before taking a drag. When he doesn’t throw it away in disgust, she motions for him to have the rest.

‘I don’t know how long we have before Maxson catches up to us,’ she murmurs.

She’s already stopped thinking of him as _The Elder_. She’s skirted the line of disobedience a few times in her dealings with the Brotherhood, always _just_ staying on the right side, but this is the first time she’s ever disobeyed a direct order.

Danse nods thoughtfully. He doesn’t reply for a while — just finishes the cigarette off and stubs it out on the concrete of the wall beside him. She notices, with a little pang, that he doesn’t just toss it on the ground. A gentleman to the last.

‘You need to report to the Prydwen,’ he states. He reaches into the collar of his flight suit and tugs his holotags free; with a considerable amount of hesitance, he pulls the chain over his head and hands the tags to her. ‘The longer you take, the more suspicious he’ll be.’

The tags are warm when she takes them from him; she lets the heat leach into the palm of her hand for a moment before pocketing them.

‘What are you gonna do?’

Nora already knows the answer, in a way. There’s nowhere for him to go, nobody for him to turn to apart from her and Haylen — and she knows that they’ve both already risked too much to help him. He won’t turn to them for help again.

‘This seems like a good location to lay low,’ he says, with a glance toward the doorway. He seems resigned; she supposes she would be too. ‘The Brotherhood don’t know about it, and it’s far enough from civilization to avoid risk of attracting attention.’

She wonders if he plans on staying here forever. A lone thought wanders into her head, unbidden: how long is forever to a synth?

She feels cold again. Hollow.

‘I know some people who help synths,’ she says quietly. She’s almost afraid to admit it out loud, even now — she’s spent so long living a double life, making sure the two sides never meet.

Danse gives her a look. It’s not exactly surprise; disappointment, perhaps. She’s still trying to make sense of it as he pushes off from the wall and moves a little away.

‘The Railroad,’ he says. Not a question: a realization. ‘There were murmurs that you had made contact, but they were never given much weight.’

She feels the burden of her decision to work with the Railroad now. It wasn’t just a betrayal of the Brotherhood — she was betraying Danse. She thinks of all the times she discreetly left something at a dead drop while they were on patrol together, and how she had fought off the guilt by telling herself she was only doing it to help people — to help synths.

Danse turns and looks at her levelly, and she wonders if he’s thinking of all the times she was so secretive, too. She’d thought she was clever, playing it off as her way of dealing with the past. In a way it had been: channeling her grief into a noble cause.

She wants to say all this and more, but Danse looks away. She watches him stare off at some nonspecific point on the horizon, his lips a tight line.

‘They can help you,’ she says quietly. ‘You don’t have to deal with this alone.’

Nora can already imagine Deacon, aghast at one of the Brotherhood’s most senior officers strolling into HQ. She almost wishes she could be there for it.

‘I’ll reach out to them,’ she says. ‘Have them send a handler. You can talk to them, see what they’re all about. If you don’t want to get involved, fine — but they can help you make a fresh start.’

‘A fresh start?’

He sounds so bitter, so forlorn. She wants to reach out to touch him, but she can’t stomach the thought of seeing him recoil.

‘Would they give me a new face?’ he continues, so cynical she flinches. ‘A new name, a new set of fake memories?’

She knows he’s angry because of everything he lost; she recognizes it because she went through it, too. She had lashed out at Preston when he had tried to enlist her into the Minutemen, just as she had lashed out when Shaun had offered her a place at the Institute.

_Shaun._

She wonders if he knows; if the SRB has any clue that their runaway synth works for the enemy.

Past tense. _Worked._ It’s still hard to get her head around it.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’

This time, she lets the compulsion to reach out to him guide her; she takes a few steps forward and places a hand on his arm. She’s tense for a moment, waiting for him to brush her off, but then he doesn’t — instead he twists and lets her hand slip free, grasping it in his own.

His dark eyes are glassy.

‘I don’t know how much of my life is real and how much is a lie.’

This is the closest Nora’s seen him to crying — closer even than when he finally opened up to her about Cutler. She gives his hand a squeeze, and he squeezes back.

‘ _This_ is real,’ she says.

It seems painfully schmaltzy — the kind of line dropped by a nervous, fumbling teenager on prom night. If this were her husband she were talking to, they would have dissolved into fits of raucous laughter over the sentiment.

Danse doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t, either.

‘You need to get back,’ he says. He still holds her hand in his own, as if reluctant to let go, but with a little sigh his fingers slip free of hers. ‘I won’t let you jeopardize yourself for me.’

He sounds so formal: a Paladin talking to his Knight. She doesn’t know what she had expected.

‘Okay.’

She swallows a lump in her throat and wraps her arms about herself, moving to the doorway. She wishes she didn’t have to go back down to that depressing, miserable bunker but she left her things down there. She regrets not gathering everything up before she came topside.

‘Nora.’

His voice is gruff. When she turns to face him, he seems to be on the precipice of something — like he can’t quite spit the words out.

Instead he flashes a wan smile and follows at her side.


End file.
